Guild Wars 2

I don’t know if this bothers anyone else, but when using skill 1 one on an elementalist asura with daggers in fire attunement , when you run the upper body still turns 360 degrees while the legs are still moving forward. It looks ridiculous, breaking their spine.

One of the sacrifices of making a game that doesn’t root you while casting, I’m afraid. You’ll have to make movement animation (lower body) independent of attack animation (upper body). The result is at best “floaty” movement and combat without any weight to it, at worst immersion-breaking and outright impossible character animations.

Be happy you’re not playing Neverwinter Online, where the Control Wizard does that weird animation stuff 99% of the time. :P

… and suddenly im glad i made my ele human
… theres a pretty funny similar animation bug with a few skills used by running chars (which keep the weapon sheathed)

I’ve never noticed this, but I’m sure now that you mentioned it I will. So thanks for that :p

What the first reply said seems about right. Its a nessicary evil of letting you move while attacking. They could specifically alter the animation during this attack only, though.

Well, if I were to hazard a guess (being an avid gamer with interest in game development but not actually part of a development team), character attack animations are probably used in bulk – the same animation being used across multiple skills for multiple professions and even hundreds if not thousands of NPCs. And further speculating, the animations are most likely designed with the specific idea that the character is not supposed to be (mechanically speaking, not necessarily graphically) moving in any direction of the 3D space, because that’s the only way to actually make an engaging and accurate representation of attack animations. Sure, Hollywood and medieval action games gives a stunning depiction of burly men in plate armor running around a battlefield at 20 km/h swinging a greatsword around like it was made out of paper, but real combat didn’t go that way. It was typically two people in armor so heavy they could hardly move, standing with their legs firmly rooted in the ground, not even lifting their weapons unless they saw an opening. Of course that doesn’t make for the best gaming experience, but that’s the boundary between realism and enjoyment that game designers have to balance on. For those of you who’ve been in the army, for example, you know that you don’t run towards the enemy (even if the enemy lacks the ability to return fire) and unload with your rifle from the hip while mobile. You take a stationary firing position, take aim, and then fire. Again, that’s not always the most enjoyable combat for games, hence why “run-n’-gun” games are so numerous.

But I digress. Back to the core of the suggestion, to give that one attack a different animation (I assume you mean altogether so that it works both when in transit and when stationary), I believe the design team have considered that during initial development of the animations, yet decided to go for the engaging and reasonably meaty feel the animations give you if you stand still. Personally I’d agree with such a choice, as I feel the amount of connectivity I have with my character (while not so emotionally connective as a mo-cap dog) is much more important to my enjoyment of the game than immersion, and I would personally not be willing to risk sacrificing it in return for less immersion-breaking yet more boring and underperforming combat.

I apologize in advance if I’m not making as much sense as I could have, it is quite late and I really ought to have gone to bed a good two or three hours ago. But to sum my post up, I don’t think altering the animation is a good idea, I’d imagine the design team has considered that, and unicorns are without a doubt pink. I’m sure I mentioned that somewhere in here.

G’night.

asura necro axe 1 looks different (upper body) standing still to moving afaik; so its probably fixable